Oct 30
These things in his mouth, they are teeth, and apparently they can cause harm.
Easy there Kitty Kat. Now onto a more interesting Leopard….and one which won’t harm your fawn.
Oct 16
Apple.com had a cat nap for an hour or two this evening and when she woke she announced the release date for Leopard.
OS X Leopard can be pre-ordered now for the full sum of €129.
I’m going to wait until I upgrade the RAM on my Macbook before plunging for Leopard. Coincidentally, I ordered two new iMacs for work on Thursday. I was half tempted to wait until Leopard was released before ordering but it’s probably best to use the tried and tested Tiger for development work rather than entering the unknown.
A few weeks ago we took Leopard for a spin, check out the Leopard Preview.
Aug 08
Hey there MacHeads!
Before I launch into my post on the Leopard preview I guess I should say who I am and what I’m doing here. My name is Katie and I am officially Mac obsessed. I’ve been a Mac user for as long as I can remember and Cormac recently asked me to contribute here with a post or two. The whole blogging thing is relatively new to me so be patient please!
I thought that as a first post I would tell you all a little bit about the developer Leopard preview which I have been working on lately. Leopard, which is due for release in October, at a cost of approximately €150 has had a lot of coverage on various Mac sites so I thought it would be nice to cover some of the new features here. Unfortunately, due to the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) I can only give you my own thoughts on the features you have heard about and cannot really get into the finer details.
Probably the most talked about changes are the look and feel updates given to the Dock, Finder and a number of other native applications. Finder now uses Cover Flow which makes your Finder window look and feel like you are browsing your iTunes music library. In the same way you can browse your iTunes collection while viewing your artwork, Cover Flow displays a large preview of each file in your directory, while Quick Look will even playing previews of QuickTime movies. The 3D look and feel applied to the dock is carried over to the Finder preview window as well. From a user’s perspective browsing through files could not be any easier now. Finding that photo or movie is simply an arrow click (or two) away!
Another change to document browsing in Leopard is Stacks. You can create Stacks from anything you want to access quickly from one place: a handful of documents, a group of applications, or an entire folder, simply by dropping the folder onto the Dock. When you want to see the files in a Stack, all you have to do is click — Stacks spring open from the Dock in an elegant arc for a few items, or in an at-a-glance grid for more. I find this feature very convenient for folders I access on a regular basis, allowing for fast and efficient access to files in the directory.
One of the most useful features of Leopard for me so far would be Spaces. With Spaces you can create a virtual work area for each application/window and organise each Space the way you want it just by dragging in windows. The Spaces interface is very convenient and user friendly allowing rearranging of Spaces simply by drag-and-drop, toggling between Spaces using the arrow keys and activating an application with a simple Dock click will automagically bring you to the relevant Space for that application. You can create as many Spaces as you need and configure your Spaces by using the Exposé & Spaces pane in System Preferences. Arrange your Spaces according to your needs, then choose the function keys you want to control them. You can also assign applications to specific Spaces, so you will always know which Space your favourite application lives in! Linux users can breathe a sigh of relief at this progression!
My workflow in Leopard is much more efficient and certainly requires less Mighty Mouse clicks. Overall I find the environmental changes to the OS to be very welcome and beneficial from a user’s perspective. New functionality such as Time Machine makes backing up your system an incredibly quick and easy job. It keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac syncing it with an external drive, and even offering a wireless sync option for Airport Extreme Base station users.
The look and feel of many native applications have also changed in Leopard. Welcome updates to iChat, Mail, Preview, iCal and Safari all add to your daily Mac experience. Bootcamp will be automatically included as part of Leopard, making it even easier to configure a Windows partition on your Mac. With the announcements made at yesterday’s keynote about iWork and iLife ‘08 users can expect even more of their favourite applications to step up with new features ensuring the ultimate work and play environment. Roll on October for a faster, sleeker and more keyboard friendly operating system!!
Jun 12
To coincide with the recent WWDC conference and Steve Job’s keynote speech, the Leopard website has been updated. The site features a run down of some of the forthcoming features, which include:
- A more 3D based Dock.
- A new Finder, it is pretty much based on the iTunes layout.
- Stacks - This feature stacks multiple folders on top of each other when in the Dock.
- Quick Look - Provides a live preview of the document.
- Spaces - Allows you to switch between workspaces.
- Boot Camp - Installed as default.
- Dynamic Widget Creation - Allows you to create on the fly widgets based on a website’s content.
- Spotlight - Will have the ability to search Macs and PCs on your local network.
- .Mac - The spotlight search is going to extend to Macs outside of your local network.
- iChat - Is set to get a massive facelift on Leopard.
- Time Machine - Back up and recovery software which uses Spotlight and Quick Look.
The keynote speech is available to stream (quicktime of course), it is quite long but worth the watch. I have watched the first hour of the speech which touched on EA Sports and ID Games coming to Mac and of course demonstrated Leopard to the 5000+ audience.
Below is a shorter promtional video which demonstrates some of the above features of Leopard
One thing I didn’t like about the Keynote speech was Apple’s snobbery at Windows again. The opening video footage featured ‘PC’ from the ‘I’m a PC, I’m a Mac’ advert trying to pass himself off as Steve Jobs. PC stated that he is quiting Apple and shutting down the whole company. While the footage was fairly funny it wasn’t really required to be shown to the audience. Below is a cam recording of the footage.
Okay, back to Leopard. It looks amazing. Roll on October. 
The stand out features for me include, the dynamic widget creation, workspace and stacks. The Widget feature allows you to highlight any area in a webpage and then ‘grab’ the contents of that area and turns that area into a widget. It’s basically like dynamic RSS. It’s a really imaginative addition. The upgrade to Leopard from Tiger will cost approx <€150. Roll on October.
Other discussions of WDMC 2007